XP Pro (Shuttle AV18S98I Award Bios)

My Mother Board is about one & a half years old. Should I try to get an upgrade to the Bios? I found one on the net but I have never done anything like Bios Flash before . It seems kind of complicated. I know that when I reboot I see something called AWDFLASH (F2 key). Is that something you would use to do a Bios Flash? And Is it worth the time and trouble? Will it help?

Re: XP Pro (Shuttle AV18S98I Award Bios)

The first rule of the BIOS: If it ain't broke.....don't fix it.

BIOS upgrades are released for two primary reasons. In most cases, it's to fix bugs in the BIOS code that affect the way your computer operates. If your machine acts flaky in some way, look at the release notes for the BIOS revisions to see if that particular issue is addressed. If your computer is running well, leave it alone, because a BIOS upgrade can leave you without a booting PC.

The actual flashing process is pretty simple. First, you format a floppy disk with DOS so that your computer can boot with it (creating a "system disk"). Note - the boot disks for Windows NT, 2000, and XP won't work! Second, you copy (or extract from the ZIP file) the BIOS image file (xxxxx.BIN, xxxxx.AWD, etc) to the disk, and boot with your new floppy. Then you run the BIOS flash program, which on your computer is built in, and specify the BIOS image name when asked.

The secondary, and usually spoken about in muffled voices in computer maker's board meetings, is to enable additional features that allow you to overclock and tweak your hardware's performance. There's a whole underground of folks who overclock their computers. Overclocking, in the simplest terms, is running your computer faster than the designers deemed stable and suitable. Think of it as using 240 volts instead of 120 volts (US, for our friends who don't use that standard....just multiply it by two) to run your stereo because you can get a boost in the volume without paying extra. You can run your Pentium IV 1.8GHz processor at 2.0GHz. But the downside is that you're running it hotter, your system may become unstable, lock up and cheese you off, and you're really not gaining much anyway. If you want to learn more about it, here's a pre-defined Google search for you to check out..

Re: XP Pro (Shuttle AV18S98I Award Bios)

And, at the risk of repeating something Mark said in another thread somewhere, anyone who gets up the nerve to flash his BIOS had better get that upgrade from the manufacturer of the motherboard and NOT some seemingly reputable site on the web somewhere! There are exceptions, of course, like if you buy a Gateway computer you'd probably get BIOS upgrades from them since their motherboards come (usually) from multiple sources. I have an excellent Intel motherboard in this machine and I HAD to flash the BIOS when I wanted to put a Pentium III 600 processor in it. But, I got the flash from Intel, crossed my fingers and held my breath. And, I was lucky.....